Am I still not a man and a brother?: protest memory in contemporary antislavery visual culture

Trodd, Zoe

Abstract

This article examines the visual culture of the twenty-first century antislavery movement,
arguing that it adapts four main icons of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionism
for its contemporary campaigns against global slavery and human trafficking: the ‘Am I
Not a Man and a Brother’ icon, the diagram of the ‘Brookes’ slave ship, the ‘Scourged
Back’ photograph and the auction-block detail from the Liberator masthead. Finding
some of the same limitations of paternalism, dehumanisation and sensationalism as
dominated much of the first antislavery movement’s visual culture, the article nonetheless
identifies a liberatory aesthetic and a protest memory in the antislavery imagery of several
contemporary artists, including Charles Campbell and Romuald Hazoume`.

Citation

Trodd, Z. (2013). Am I still not a man and a brother?: protest memory in contemporary antislavery visual culture. Slavery and Abolition, 34(2), https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.791172

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: May 1, 2013
• Deposit Date: Apr 17, 2014
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 17, 2014
• Journal: Slavery and Abolition
• Print ISSN: 0144-039X
• Electronic ISSN: 1743-9523
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 34
• Issue: 2
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.791172
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1002247
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2013.791172